by Ron Foster
THE WORK OF THE DEAD
RON FOSTER
ALABAMA, USA
© 2016 by Ron Foster
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13:
978-1530839797
ISBN-10:
1530839793
Printed in the United States of America.
Preface
Author’s Note On “About The Way This Book Is Written.”
Southerners have an often times, well let’s say a pretty unique way of expressing ourselves that often mystifies those who are considered 'not from 'round here'. This is a common colloquial trait we share and yes, we are indeed sort of proud of it. Whether it's describing incredibly lazy people, really fat people, skinny people, dishonest people, dumb people or just dishing it out while talking about life in general, Southerners have got some kind of an 'ism' for just about any job you can think of and I have a few of my own ...
Some of these old sayings are so clean you could repeat them around the reverend after Sunday service and others might be said to be dirtier than two ticks mud-wrestling in an outhouse. Hopefully, by the time you're finished reading this southern prepper fiction story and reading a few of them you'll be tickled pink, or at the very least grinnin' like a possum eating briers as the author translates them for you.
.
To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone - Reba McEntire
Acknowledgements
Taylor Brand Knives
Bill Pascale
Out Side The Box Division of SurvivalistGear.com
1
POP GOES THE WOOZLE
It was the start of unseasonably cold early spring time in the post apocalyptic sovereign state of Alabama. The survivors of this solar storm induced dark and dismal grid down world had no earthly idea that fate would soon bring a momentous turn of events their way for the worse. Harrowing events that would rival all the bad luck that they had lived through and survived to date.
Almost five and a half long years had passed since the great cities turned to ashes from the uncontrolled fires that had raged unchecked and in some places were said to be still smoldering. Widespread famine and violence had killed off large portions of humanity in North America and elsewhere in the world on a grand scale.
A large percentage of the remaining still starving and struggling surviving citizenry in America lived as best they could in the central state government controlled small cities and relocation centers scattered across the country’s heartland while the rest of the vastness of the US was dotted with small enclaves of rugged survivalists and tiny towns of feudal like societies cut off from the rest of society by the catastrophic global infrastructure melt down.
What the outlanders and the city state dwellers all had in common was that they all struggled daily to make ends meet and that for them an early demise was basically assured if anything else broke or collapsed in the fragile food supply chains that they depended on. This fact was particularly true the further one got from the FEMA semi controlled reestablishment zones that you lived in or nearby to usually. Go out traveling past the remaining government garrison points and big trouble was inevitable and most likely patiently laying in wait for you to screw up and come visiting.
In most of these desolate ravaged areas if anyone was brave enough or foolish enough to dare travel only a few miles in any direction other than within their own only little carved out shotgun toting semi safe havens, then they would assuredly face a world without rule of law. (WROL). Honest and pure anarchy awaited in more nasty forms imaginablefor the unwary. This is a world where man fights against man in a malevolent “state of nature” where life is often “solitary, poorer, brutish and short following a trail of dejection and dystopian despair.
For most people still living in the outlands, there were always others to contend with, always other different men and women who were possibly dangerous that had banded together in militias, clans and tribes for survival needing the same stuff you did. Their world was in a constant malevolent state of flux with border wars and blood feuds going on as an ever larger barren desert of hopelessness formed around them and created places where there is no peaceful settlement of disputes.
If you were not a local and from one of these areas or possessed any previous knowledge of their locations, then there is no way to have a cogent assessment of which people and districts were "hostile" to avoid or which were somewhat "friendly" to visit in hopes of trade. There's no definition or real profiling going on about who is actually the ones looting, stealing or raping, if you're out on the street and out of your area and available, you're either a suspect or a victim. Period… end of story, all she wrote.
There is no government presence to note other than the rare occasional US military and the UN vehicles occasionally seen traveling in dubious convoys while competing and gathering up usable materials or confiscating supplies. There is no authority except at the end of your gun. It is all clan ruled, clan fighting clan; militia clashes against tribes or gangs etc. as well as the further grind of daily living dangers to contend with. There are no solo survivalists or travelers in evidence much anymore. It was and still is all about the clans rule and militia’s authority and the areas they controlled or wanted to control.
Attempting to be out risking any kind of traveling through unknown territory was called running the gauntlet and this was often done as surreptitiously as possible for individuals or groups to try to get to government controlled so called “civilization and relocation zones” before you and your family starved to death or maybe your neighbors killed you for what you had left in food or inconsequential wealth for the taking.
Professional highway men, murderous thieves and robbers of every kind, color and temperament often times took advantage of these lawless situations and lay in hateful wait off the main roads for unwary travelers to attack before the local militia or other well armed or trained group claiming the area decided to take them out with shot and shell or maybe the criminals just decided to move on by themselves looking for easier pickings.
This WROL situation in the FEMA camps was happening more slowly, what would normally be crime ceased to be thought of as crime and general lawlessness became more routine and predictable. Then, people began to recognize that the only alternatives to the rule of law that they thought they were enjoying now in the centers are only corrupting influences like the power of money, influence and guns which they would have to inevitably adapt to or leave and take their chances. This fiasco refugee environment perpetuates a vicious cycle of distrust, hate and confusion and it was for these reasons and many others that a sort of reverse migration was also occurring to move away from the relocation camps.
As the nanny state’s legitimacy and economy crumbles and any kind of realistic democratic means of redress is apparently lacking, then this is the boiling point that eventually forces protesters and destitute citizens alike to take the streets back over or further mobilize along ethnic, religious or linguistic lines.
Having said that, please consider that the rule of law will not stand very long in an emergency or for that matter in normal times when traditional concepts that centre on fair procedures and equal playing fields are not taken into perspective. Firstly consider that unclear and unintelligible emergency powers acts and mandates affecting personal and corporate property confiscation laws had already created constant anxiety to the common man in every turn of his actions because he did not know from one moment to the
next what the law prescribes or is considered permissible.
Secondly, these emergency laws and unconstitutional executive orders that were being enforced under color of law were not equally applied, many of the influential class of society benefited from them and unfairly escaped from facing the music while the common man was encouraged to disobey or ignore the law in order to survive.
Thirdly, when the collapse of society happened martial law was applied strictly and people were stripped of the right to a fair trial and were often considered guilty before proven so. Many remained in detention facilities uninformed of their grounds of arrest and they lacked any kind of legal representation to defend themselves. Worse yet, there were rumors of nameless officials knocking on doors at night and of people mysteriously disappearing.
As the diets of those voluntarily or otherwise people who were interned in the camps became more meager from crop shortages and failures etc. and their ration books were threatened more and more often with their confiscation or reductions of meager rations for any infractions, a lot of people began to think about and consider moving on to somewhere else. This was because they remembered that the closer that you lived to people living off the governments entitlement programs and dole, the more that you have to be concerned with and worried about. Still, food was a big magnet to attract people to the camps as well as the big stick government used to keep them in line.
If you were trying to be resourceful and bought and sold unofficial trading goods in the camps you might often be labeled a black marketer and subject to one law or another and lose your goods as well as your freedom. Because of this little legal paradox and predicament the “Free Trader” movement began. If you tried trading your wares “off post” that is beyond the fence of the camp or base you were on and took only government script for your goods in exchange for them, then you were pretty much left alone by the authorities as long as you weren’t exchanging gold and silver which was now subject to confiscation if you hadn’t turned it in for a few pieces of government paper money in this new economy. Jewelry was ok for you to personally keep and possess as long as you weren’t caught monetizing it in anyway, but coins and bullion were verboten, highly illegal commodities now and could cause you a world of grief if you got caught with them. This little world of restricted and free trade zones took on new meanings and offered new possibilities very shortly thereafter.
Convoys of traders started forming up and venturing out past the government controlled gates as now officially non camp residents began to seek out trade goods and luxuries as well as line their pockets with more tangible and now illegal precious metal wealth in the outlands and wild areas surrounding the so called federal controlled proted areas or sanctuaries. What the government didn’t see or know about sounded good enough to them to keep them ranging farther and further afield for the sake of commerce and they brought with them in their new migration their own form of civilization and instant justice.
Most chilling was the lawless violence a trading party could run into. Murderers or Militia, you never knew which awaited you and many people found out the hard way that some wear both hats and are not honorable at all if their own personal gain is involved.
Some folks tried to describe and compare this sparse bartering and dangerous selling existence to living in the proverbial old Wild West but there was literally no comparison to that era and this new apocalyptic real life fraught with new dangers.
You see way back in those covered wagon, pioneer, prospector and gunslinger days, those terms referred to mostly sane law abiding people who were traveling towards new hopes and dreams for building a new life and building new societies in unsettled lands.
The settlers and traders back then had dreams of building their own little towns on unclaimed and possibly never explored lands and building up a new territory to statehood. Bargaining with war lords and scavenging abandoned cities is a lot different than fighting off hostile Indian attacks or trapping for furs to trade. Back in the bygone era masses of people banded together with the common goal of joining up with strangers as a common defense and support system to face the hardships and dangers of settling a new country and expanding so called modern civilization way back then. These days’ people banded together to takeover their neighbor’s goods or repel an invasion of desperate outsiders doing the same for mostly the same reasons of marauding for survival.
Nowadays if you traveled anywhere far at all, you did so very carefully and you did it mostly to just survive. You weren’t really traveling to somewhere with a specific meaningful intent to better yourself and society, no; you were most likely running away from something or another or giving up on freedom and trying to run the gauntlet to get to a FEMA relocation center. The days of open roads and government assistance to keep them clear, secure and even partly maintained was long over many years ago.
If you were by some chance spotted to be out on foot or riding in a single vehicle these days while risking the dangers of the main roads and highways, rest assured then something bad was probably following you. At best, a bedevilment of some sort was occurring and you needed far away from it and the problems that were pushing you some distance away from where you had formerly called home towards a temporary new one.
This wasn’t always true of course, but it was usually a pretty accurate assessment enough to say that for you to be out exposed like that, it smelled of advancing trouble or mayhem pursuing. Could only be however an unlikely scenario that you just got the itch to venture out past the borders of your own familiar neighborhood for oh so many reasons no one would ever know. I say no one would ever know because you likely were not going to be ever coming back. However, usually the decision to leave anywhere pretty much centered around and basically boiled down to just three things and that was acquiring the basics of food, water and security.
Some people made a living off these and trading other needful things and profited by them; you called them “Free Traders” or Black Marketers depending on which side of the law you were on or how you viewed yourself and your vocation or job.
The size of a trade caravan was limited by the amount of usable gas you could acquire as well as the size of the market it intended to serve. Sure there was safety in numbers but there was no profit in it if you didn’t have enough customers to go around once you arrived at a destination. Convoy style trading groups of 5 to 10 vehicles were more common than the big trade caravans containing big rig trucks that could be seen at the primitive trade rendezvous in spring and fall far distant from any regular governmental enclaves.
The remoteness of these meeting places served many purposes but its main one was to make it as hard as possible on the government should they somehow decide they wanted to regulate the events or confiscate any goods. They all had good reason to fear this sort of thing out of their Government because of past experiences with emergency power acts enforcements but also it was because the so called “Constitutionalist Money Movement” was gaining such momentum and the pre collapse good old boys of Homeland Security thought it was heresy or something akin to it deserving major punishment to even suggest the dissolution of this new unelected allegedly temporary emergency government to return to the Republic and currency standards our forefathers had laid out.
One thing by now that most everybody had sort of caught on to was that not only does a world without the rule of law threaten the rights of men but it actually devours the entire spirit of democracy itself. Folks need organizing and controlling but big government is not the answer; it’s the community vote that morally counts and governs best in most cases.
Look at it this way, burglary and looting are crimes of opportunity. The opportunity for a burglar is usually an unsuspecting homeowner or a house that is easily broken into. Now looting on the other hand uses the opportunity of a situation in which the perceived enforcement of laws by police powers has dissolved. As Mark Twain aptly put it “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics” describing the pe
rsuasive power of numbers, particularly the use of statistics to bolster weak arguments. It is also sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent's point. That’s what the current government was doing when it made allotments for itself while taxing, appropriating or confiscating what it needed to increase its wealth and keep it in power. The government emergency power acts created for the elites their own opportunities to loot what it needed from the citizenry just like the British had in the Revolutionary war to house its standing army subjugating and controlling its debt slaves, the ordinary people. It created its own crisis and then said it was there to help you get through them for a price of course and that usually involved giving up some form of freedom.
Hell, the whole of the entire United States was in this mess right now because big government ignored in their all powerful big brother wisdom of the statistical use of tax dollars not being allotted after the NASA warning about upgrading our electrical grid by spending millions and instead funded studying things with billions of dollars like putting a tariff on global warming. Come to think of it an old jest runs to the effect that there are three degrees of comparison among liars. There are liars, there are outrageous liars, and there are scientific experts.
The economic experts said now that implementing the newly printed small denomination funny money fiat paper dollars or military script was a good thing for the economy while the majority of people in the outlands were themselves trading distance from government control for real dollars. Constitutional currency of a sort is what traders often times only dealt in. It was too dangerous to be caught carrying hard cash so eventually a few of the more astute and wise businessmen in the community got everyone in agreement on sort of an underground trade system that could be universally accepted.
